Introduction

Jim van der Ploeg

My Corpus will be modern electronic music, since it’s the type of music I’m most familiar with. It’s of course a relatively new type of music with much still unexplored and a lot has developed over even the past 20 years. What I think will be interesting to compare here is geographical differences: Western and Eastern cultures are of course very different of each other and this reflects in their music, but even between just Europe and America there should be plenty of differences that can be explored.

The Corpus for this project was the music of two different artists in the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) Scene. The first artist is Martin Garrix, a well-known dutch DJ with 23 million monthly listeners who primarily makes house music for the mainstream public but also branches out to other types of sound such as pop music. The second artist is Shingo Nakamura, a lesser known DJ from Japan with 200.000 montly listeners who almost exclusively releases progressive house music and mixes.

The idea here is to see if there are recognizable differences between the music of the two artists and how much these differences can be explained by the differences between the artists: Although they are both EDM DJs, they come from different countries, release slightly different genres of music and have a large difference in their following.

Comparison of 2 DJ Sets


Key differences that can be noted here are:

Comparing the chromagrams of two songs


Timbre Comparison


Comparing the artist highlight playlists


Tempo Analysis of two songs


Conclusion